Cloud-based provisioning of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) has gained in popularity. Various tools to assist a customer to bring up an initial deployment of IaaS or PaaS or SaaS have emerged and customers have access to an ever-broadening array of infrastructure, platforms, and software, yet ongoing improvements to the infrastructure or platform or software provided as a service often occur without awareness by the end-customers. In some cases customers do not want to know about changes (e.g., leaving hardware management, upgrades and infrastructure improvements to the IaaS cloud vendor); the end customer might not ever even know of such improvements. However, in other cases, the end-customer might want to know about new offerings (e.g., a new software application or a new feature, etc.) and might want to perform a periodic assessment of the end-customer's configuration. In some cases (esp., in PaaS deployments) customers provide custom software, and would want to know about changes underlying the services of the PaaS offering.
Further, a cloud vendor might realize that certain software application offerings and/or certain feature offerings in their SaaS can be used as a competitive differentiator and/or for increasing usage and customer satisfaction.
Unfortunately, there are no tools or computer-aided capabilities that could assist the vendor to identify new software application offerings and/or new feature offerings in their SaaS that can be used as a competitive differentiator and/or for increasing usage and customer satisfaction. Accordingly, both cloud vendors and their customers are unaware of value that can be seized upon by both parties.
Moreover, none of the aforementioned technologies have the capabilities to perform the herein-disclosed techniques for forming an upgrade recommendation in a cloud computing environment. There is a need for an improved approach.